The bottom of the deep ocean is not the most hospitable place in the world, but it is not devoid of life either. Scientists have recently documented that oxygen is disappearing from seawater…

UPDATE: Just found out that Peter Woit anticipated me on this - see his blog entry.--- Just five years ago, on the eve of the start of the Large Hadron Collider, most particle physicists -…

An ordinary No. 2 pencil contains graphite (from the Greek γράφω, graphō which means "to write" or "to draw").  Graphite conducts electricity and you can use your pencil and a piece of…

To translate one language into another, find the linear transformation that maps one to the other. Simple, if you are part of an elite team of Google engineers. A new translation technique being…

Previous research into genetic variants has shown that dancers really are different than most people and a new neuroscience study sheds some light on ballet brains as well. Differences in the brain…

Native small mammals on forest islands created by a large hydroelectric reservoir in Thailand faced extinction and a new paper says species living in rainforest fragments could be far more likely to…

The first rock that scientists analyzed on Mars with a pair of chemical instruments aboard the Curiosity rover turned out to be a doozy – a pyramid-shaped volcanic rock called a "mugearite" that is…

The first scoop of soil analyzed by the analytical suite in the belly of NASA's Curiosity rover reveals that fine materials on the surface of the planet contain several percent water by weight.…

The quest for evidence of life on Mars could be more complicated than previously thought due to  perchlorate,, a salt comprised of chlorine and oxygen, that interferes with the techniques used…

NASA's Curiosity Rover has sampled a surprising diversity of soils and sediments along a half-kilometer route during its first few months on Mars. And what it has found tells a complex story about…